The constant series of attempts by the German and Allied armies to outflank one another all along the French-Belgian border goes on relentlessly. The loss of life increases alarmingly by the day.
The war, initiated by rulers whose motives are akin to the vainglories of medieval kings and princes, is, despite the impressive resolve of its generals and soldiers, impossible to win, at least in the short term. All the while, the new technologies of transportation and weaponry are enabling millions of young men to be sent to the battlefield, where they are being killed on a horrifying scale by increasingly lethal modern armaments.
The British Expeditionary Force, the greater part of Britain’s small but outstanding army, is being destroyed. Of the BEF’s original strength of eighty-four infantry battalions just two months ago, each of which comprised about 970 men, only nine have between 350 and 450 survivors. Thirty-one are down to between 200 and 300, and eighteen have fewer than 100 fit men ready for action. The most severely depleted of all, the 1st Loyal North Lancashire, is a battalion in name only as it now consists of one officer and thirty-five men.
Besides the obvious bullet wounds, shrapnel injuries and the mutilations caused by artillery shells, a new malady is beginning to emerge. There are more and more reports of less tangible symptoms after combat, including tinnitus, amnesia, headache, dizziness, tremors and hypersensitivity to noise. What puzzles the medical staff is that men often present with these ailments even when they have not been in close proximity to an explosion. There are also increasing numbers of men who appear ‘lost’ or ‘disorientated’. Fellow soldiers coin a new term for their condition: ‘the thousand-yard stare’. The medics begin to use the term ‘shell shock’.
Many suffer from ‘nervous disorders’ that some call ‘fear of battle’ and others call ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’. For the men of High Command, ‘shell shock’ and ‘nerves’ pose a major dilemma, one that they choose to ignore. After all, what is the difference between conditions caused by the psychological stress of battle and the ‘cowardice’ exhibited by men who do not have the stomach for the fight? Few senior commanders allow themselves to show much sympathy for men who are described as ‘shell-shocked’ or suffering from ‘nerves’, even though there is much evidence that the phenomenon extends to the very top of the military hierarchy.
As in France and Germany, the personal tragedies of the death toll reach into every corner of Britain, including the homes of the ruling class, whose sons in the officer corps are dying in staggering numbers. Prince Maurice of Battenberg, the nephew of Winston Churchill’s First Sea Lord, Louis of Battenberg, and a grandson of Queen Victoria, dies at Ypres serving with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Winston’s cousin, 2nd Lieutenant Norman Leslie, the son of Lady Randolph’s sister Leonie and her husband, Sir John Leslie, is killed with the Rifle Brigade at Armentières.
It is also a bleak time for the Stewart-Murrays of Blair Atholl. There is still no word from or sighting of Geordie. It is now six weeks since he was last seen in action with the Black Watch near Vailly.
Eton College, perhaps the one school that most typifies the noblesse oblige of the British aristocracy, and the Stewart-Murrays’ Alma Mater, will send 5,629 Old Etonians to fight in the Great War. Of these, 1,157 will be killed, another 1,460 will be injured and 130 will be taken prisoner. Those who are born to lead must expect to bleed.
The telegrams begin to arrive at remote farms, village cottages, detached and semi-detached suburban homes and terraced houses all over the country. For the time being they are delivered to the families of professional soldiers and army reservists, but that will soon change, as will their volume and frequency.
The Ypres Salient remains the critical fulcrum of the war in the autumn of 1914. For British forces, the fighting is being concentrated into an increasingly confined area along a line between Lille and Béthune in the south, and between Ypres and Armentières to the east.
But the whole of the front line extends much further. North of Sir John French’s BEF at Ypres, between his soldiers and the coast, the Allied line is held by French and Belgian troops who are resolutely defending their position west of the Yser River under the direct command of Albert, King of the Belgians. To the south of Béthune, the defensive bulwark is held by General d’Urbal’s 8th French Army, which continues to fight with great tenacity. Facing the Allies are two entire German Army Groups: the 4th, under General Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, and the 6th, under Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. In total, Allied forces number just over 350,000, while the two German armies can muster well over 500,000.
French colonial troops from Morocco have already acquitted themselves well in the fighting. Newly arrived British Empire troops from the Meerut and Lahore Divisions of the Indian Army will soon perform with equal distinction, despite having only meagre supplies, few munitions and no winter clothing.
Significantly, the events in and around Ypres in the autumn of 1914 are to offer a salutary lesson: in the battles of the Great War, it is far easier to defend a position than to attack one. Both the Allies and the Germans are running short of food, clothing, medical supplies and materiel. Shells and bullets are being rationed and transportation is becoming a major headache. The railway systems are in chaos and the roads are blocked by shell holes, broken-down vehicles and endless streams of civilians seeking refuge from the fighting.
Bicycles become a godsend for messengers and reconnaissance; dogs are used as pack animals for machine guns and small mortars. Horses are put to use in the more mundane role of beasts of burden, rather than as cavalry chargers, and aerial scouting from the sky becomes vital to strategic planning.
There is many a nostalgic sighting for British men far away from home when huge fleets of buses arrive, still painted in the liveries of the bus companies belonging to the towns and cities of their origins. They include over 300 red and white ‘Old Bill’ London buses requisitioned from the London General Omnibus Company. Each BEF brigade is allocated thirty buses, manned by their own volunteer drivers, who are given uniforms and rifles. Stories soon circulate, apocryphal or otherwise, that men are being driven to the battlefield by bus drivers who previously drove them to work in Civvy Street.
Serjeant Harry Woodruff and what remains of the 4th Battalion Royal Fusiliers arrive at Pont Logy, 1,000 yards due west of Neuve-Chapelle, early in the afternoon of 25 October.
Neuve-Chappelle is a village of little distinction eight miles north-east of Béthune and sixteen miles south-west of Lille. Like so much of the ground over which the opposing armies have fought since the war began, the landscape is monotonously flat, with only the occasional church spire to break up the otherwise tedious horizon. Well-engineered French rural roads criss-cross the terrain in almost endless straight lines and disappear to a vanishing point, their drainage ditches offering the only cover between huge open fields of crops.
The fusiliers can see the houses of Neuve-Chappelle in the distance. They are occupied by men of Germany’s 158th Infantry Regiment (7th Lotharingians) from Paderborn in Westphalia. The Londoners are told that the order to attack is imminent and that they must stand to.
Harry looks round at his platoon. Most are new reservists, recently arrived from hasty preparatory retraining at Albany Barracks. He wishes Maurice was here, but it has only been eight days since his bayonet wound at Herlies. At least Captain Carey is nearby; both he and Major Ashburner have recovered from the flesh wounds they received in the skirmish.
There has been no replacement for Lieutenant Mead, killed at Herlies, and no new company serjeant major to replace Billy Carstairs, killed at Vailly.
An hour passes and there is still no order to attack. The only movement is the appearance of a bicycle at about 3 p.m., hurtling towards them down Rue du Grand Chemin from the direction of Battalion HQ. It carries a fusilier, peddling frantically, as if in possession of an urgent message. But when the rider comes to a halt at the side of the road, it is not a messenger but Platoon Serjeant Maurice Tait.
Harry is open-mouthed.
‘What the fuck are you doin’ ’ere?’
‘I’ve come to keep an eye on you!’
‘Thought you was gonna be banged up in ’ospital.’
‘The nurse I saw was a right Miss Fitch, and the Doc said I’d be as right as ninepence in a fortnight, so I fucked off!’
‘How did yer get back?’
‘Hitched a lift wiv some Cherry Bums, 4th Hussars, on their way down ’ere.’
‘Hussars! “Whose-arse” tonight, you mean! Not gone queer on me, ’ave yer, Mo?’
‘Fuck off, ’Arry! They were good lads; their officer gave me a packet of fags.’
‘He sounds like an iron hoof to me. Didn’t tell yer to bend over and tie up yer shoelaces, did he?’
Maurice just grins, ignoring Harry’s taunting. So Harry changes the subject.
‘’Ave yer seen Ashburner?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Fusilier Tait, you are a very ill-disciplined soldier and deserve to be sent straight back to the hospital and punished for insubordination.” Then he stood up, smiled at me and said, “But we need men like you here. Very good to have you back. Your platoon is at Pon Loggy” – or something like that – “so see if you can get up there. A little skirmish is in the offing.” ’
Harry smirks.
‘Little skirmish! Take a butcher’s: a thousand yards of open ground, and Fritz is in every birch an’ broom in them ’ouses over there. Some tosser at HQ ’as looked at a map and said, “Jolly easy stroll to the German positions, no problem for our lads!” Well, he don’t ’ave to fuckin’ walk it, do he?’
Maurice realizes that Harry’s mood is no calmer than when he left.
Five minutes later, the order passes down the line and hundreds of Cockneys in khaki begin to move across the broad fields of Neuve-Chapelle; to the right are the Northumberlands, to the left the Lincolnshires. They are a comfort to the London boys. They have given stern support whenever it was needed in the past; today they will have to do so again.
The first men begin to fall at about 700 yards. The toll grows exponentially with every yard thereafter. There is no cover, and no evasive action is available; survival is a lottery, determined by the aim of the German marksmen, or the breaths of wind that make bullets veer away from their intended victims. Who would send men across open ground into repetitive hailstorms of bullets unleashed from lethally accurate modern rifles and machine guns? The answer is tragically simple: generals who have no other strategy, because none has yet been thought of.
The fusiliers, like all the other men on the battlefields on both sides of the Great War, know that the only combination that will unlock the secret code of victory in this diabolical conflict is simple: whoever is prepared to sacrifice the most men, the most resources and has the strongest stomach for the fight. All any man can hope for in the numbers game of the Great War is that his name, in the final reckoning, will be added to the list of survivors rather than the toll of the dead.
Harry and Maurice, in the absence of a replacement for Lieutenant Mead, are de facto commanding officers of their platoon. They have survived over 800 of the 1,000 yards to Neuve-Chapelle when they hear Captain Carey’s order: ‘Fix bayonets!’
Instead of running pell-mell towards the German positions, Maurice and Harry order their men to crouch down and take a breath as they fix their bayonets. It is a shrewd decision; fusiliers around them take the brunt of the final frantic volleys of the German defenders, loosed before the hand-to-hand fighting begins. When the hail of bullets recedes, Harry orders the platoon to charge. With the two serjeants leading the assault, they identify a single modest house in Neuve-Chapelle and storm into it.
Their platoon is now only a dozen strong – half the number which, only minutes ago, started the 1,000-yard walk – but there are only a handful of Germans in the house. After five minutes of primordial killing by bullet and bayonet, all the Lotharingians, the sons of Paderborn’s tailors, clerks and artisans, are dead. Four fusiliers are also dead. Blood covers the walls and floor; crumpled bodies have fallen in distorted heaps in the corners of the room or lie sprawled across the meagre peasant furniture. Patches of German field-grey uniforms have turned ruby and circles of British khaki have become brown, darkened by the cherry red of men’s blood.
There is a sudden eerie silence, except for the deep breathing of men recovering from the exertion of a fight to the death. Of the twenty-six men who began the attack at Pont Logy with Maurice and Harry, only eight are still standing.
Harry issues a stark command.
‘Make sure all these German bastards are dead. If they’re not, slit their fuckin’ throats.’
His emotion is in stark contrast to his benign attitude towards his German adversaries only a few days ago in Herlies.
But that is the terrible dichotomy of men’s appetites in wartime.